Scouting for Crappie on Chickamauga

It has been two weeks to the day since I last fished for crappie, my favorite fish to pursue. I didn't even fish at all last week as I had other things that needed to be taken care of. So, I was ready to scout a little bit today. There was a rather large area of the lake that I had never fished or scouted so I wanted to spend the majority of the time doing that. The rods stayed in their holders until we either found some fish or stumbled upon something that required us to wet a jig. Grin.

I invited Mr S to accompany me this morning as I know that he likes to scout as well and really doesn't care if we fished a lot or not. We were scouting a ditch that was parallel to the main river channel and I was looking for brush, stumps, etc on the drop offs. There was a lot of bait fish in this area and I was a little bit surprised at that as we were easily over 100 yards or more from the main river channel delta. The depth in the ditch was around 22-25 feet most of the time and it was 10 feet or so on top of the flat that the ditch ran through.

We found what we perceived to be a brush pile with fish stacked over the top that looked like a Christmas tree. I have found that these fish are usually crappie. Although we were out of the major feeding period for the day, we still managed to hook and land 3 crappie. Mr S got the first one to the side of the boat and was lifting it when the jig fell out of its mouth and it went back into the water. A couple of minutes later, I hooked a good fish that I thought was a bass from the way it was pulling and it did rise to the surface quickly and jump, but when I saw the fish, I realized that I had a big crappie. It was a 15 1/8" White crappie that had very healthy shoulders. We took pics, measured and quickly released it. Lebron caught another keeper there in a few minutes after that before we resumed scouting.

After scouting, we hit a couple of off shore structures and only got one more bite from the crappie, but Lebron caught a spotted bass that had its mate swimming around it at the boat. I dropped a jig and tried to get it to eat it, but it would'n't do it. Grin. I later caught a channel catfish and that was it for the morning. We both had had enough to take the edge off our wanting to jerk some fish around.

Bobby Garland Minnow Mind'R in the Cicada color is what fooled the big white crappie and another 13" crappie that I caught about 1 hour later. Lebron caught his on a crappie Magnet 3" bait.